Today, it suddenly occurred to me why I develop myself. Why I study and learn to be wise, why I develop my projects… It’s not just for the sake of enjoying the process of developing projects. There’s an important element here — to feel myself in the process. So, why do I need all of this? Well, the goal is clear — to be happy. But happiness can be experienced in many ways… I realized that I cannot be happy if I stay at a level where something isn’t working in my life, something that should be natural, like close relationships. It’s as if I’m trying to outgrow myself. To gain relationships? No, to not depend on whether they exist in my life or not — to be happy both in relationships and outside of them… That’s why I try to seek secrets of self-management, transformations, love, and so on… Just to one day understand that I no longer depend on this specific condition…
It doesn’t depend on us, so why should we depend on it?
It was so nice to suddenly understand this. That I try to take care of my body not to please others. But to please myself — and that’s it! And it doesn’t even matter whom else I might please in the process. Health, of course, is important, but it’s not the most important. The most important thing is the inner feeling of acceptance. Harmony. The inner light that comes from inner joy.
We try to bring our home into order. I have always believed that the home is the frame for the picture of life. My home is always beautiful. And when it’s not beautiful, I transform it to make it beautiful. 🙂 In my home, everything is usually arranged in a way that’s most harmonious with my nature. Everything is in order (which means well-organized). Wherever I live — even if it’s a hotel room that I rent for two days — I always settle in the place. I light candles, I arrange everything beautifully, I make everything comfortable in every possible way. Otherwise, I just can’t feel comfortable, at home. And that feeling is one of the most important things for me, even in temporary living spaces. Of course, we will move, the home will remain in the past, and we’ll have a new home. But while this home is with us — we need to make sure that we make it as comfortable as possible. So that the frame for the picture of our life is the most harmonious and makes our life better, helping us be more effective both in work and in rest… And really, in everything!
And what is my body? It’s the same kind of home. It’s not really part of us. We die, the body disappears — we remain. After all, we are “just passing time” here, we are travelers in this world, who rented a “place” for some 70-80 years… And our body is just a temporary dwelling, it’s given to us for the duration of the entire trip. And we can’t change it. But we can easily do renovations, tweak here, powder there, and even repaint it — look, Michael Jackson managed to do it! But it’s not enough just to tweak and fix something. What’s life like in a home that you don’t feel is your own? “Temporary,” incomplete, something like that… And the same goes for the body. What’s life like in this body if we don’t “settle in,” don’t fully accept it as our home for the duration of this journey called life…
You can perceive this hotel room simply as a place to sleep. But our life — from start to finish — is a journey. So, why not make the body a real home for the time of life!
Maybe what I’m saying is banal and obvious for many. But not for me. All my life, I lived in my body as if it were a solitary confinement cell. I never fully considered it my body, always felt it was some device for moral torture that I didn’t deserve. Even when for a while the solitary confinement cell moved to some prestigious neighborhoods, acquired some fashionable updates and fresh paint, I still didn’t truly consider it mine, a place where I would really want to relax… The dream of my entire conscious life was to escape this body to another one, to change this house — which I thought I would live in forever — for a more prestigious one, on a higher floor, with elegant “comforts” and an endlessly beautiful interior and exterior…
And it had to happen that today, I suddenly understood all of this. Not that you need to love and accept yourself as you are — I already knew that. I knew it intellectually, but it had never been my truth, it had never become my understanding.
I COULD NEVER UNDERSTAND HOW ONE COULD ENJOY LIFE IN SUCH A TERRIBLE SOLITARY CONFINEMENT CELL!
I’m sitting here crying, overwhelmed by the realization of what I’ve done to myself all my life. How much joy and love I took away from myself by hating this physical part of my being. Yes, my body is not me. But here on earth, in this life, my body is part of me as Natasha Chernyavskaya. And in this life, this is me — Natasha Chernyavskaya. This is me, and the body is part of this Natasha. And this body, that is, Natasha herself, almost all her life condemned for not being like others, but exactly like this.
Well, I understood it intellectually, but it never “clicked.” I knew perfectly well what it meant to “accept your body,” but I couldn’t accept one thing — that I needed to accept THIS body.
One remarkable woman said: “All women are goddesses, and I’m the main goddess!” Today, I thought a lot about her words. And while I was thinking, it struck me. And suddenly, I understood. I suddenly understood everything — not with my head, but with my heart — I understood it with all of me, as Natasha Chernyavskaya.
That my body is simply my transport, my temporary home in this life. And the most beautiful and also the only right thing — is to settle into it and enjoy the result! Settle in so that it feels like home. Arrange it so that it’s comfortable, not so that you bump into furniture and step on nails sticking out of the floor… Settle in — in every sense, make it truly yours! Something inside me stopped complaining about where I live, and said, “Why not! I’ll take this! And I will enjoy it a lot!”
This realization hit me with incredible force. For the first time in my life, I decided that I no longer care what this body will be like. It will lose weight, gain weight — I don’t care. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to ignore everything and just relax… On the contrary, I suddenly realized that now it will be much easier for me to focus on my health and strength. After all, it’s all about settling in, not just patching things up with a piece of wallpaper (which is what I used to do when I tried to turn a solitary confinement cell into a solitary confinement cell with an ocean view, drawn on a piece of toilet paper)…
My body has simply stopped being my punishment. And it has become a potential source of enjoyment…